Final Crisis - Return of Bruce Wayne - I'm confused

So I got into comics a couple of months ago, and to be quite frank Batman is my everything in regards to the comic world.

And, of course, when I was prowling the internet for the typical 'must-reads' for any comic-book fan Final Crisis came up a few times. So I got it. Read it. Enjoyed it, though found it terribly hard to follow with all the sciencey and multiversey mumbo-jumbo. But anyway, I moved onto Return of Bruce Wayne. Read it. Enoyed it, though found it terribly hard to follow when it came to explaining 'how' it was all happening haha

Like, to me. It was 'Batman zapped by anti-life leaving behind a skeleton and Batman somehow ends up in the past in a rocket-ship' :')

So. I've finally decided to come here searching for answers. Is there a book I'm missing? Am I simply too new to the comic-book-world to properly understand, and I should go back and re-read?

Looking forward to the answers!

@danny_vasey: Darkseid didn't really kill batman with his omega beam. And remember all the clones running around too which caused confusion as well. The corpse superman carries is that of darkseid's clone. So batman never actually was killed by darkseid but just sent back in time. Which is where ROBW picks up

Right, that's actually clearing it up a lot for me but I still don't see HOW Batman was thrown back in time in a rocket, and how the skeleton of Darkseid ended up in Batman's suit? :-S

@danny_vasey: It's a clone of Batman, not Darkseid. Not sure about the rocket I always thought it was Darkseid's Omega Beams that sent him back in time.

@reachdestroyer: Yeah, I'd read that thing about the clones somewhere but I myself haven't actually read anything pre-Crisis so I didn't know about all the clones etc. - so, there was supposedly just a dead Batman clone lying on the floor?

And yeah I think it's established the beam's sent him back, but if you actually look on one of the first few pages .. :
http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/comicsalliance.com/files/2010/05/untitled-38.jpg

@danny_vasey: Yes the omega beams sent him back. They can do whatever darkseid wants them to. And yes there were clones laying around dead from all the fighting going on

@danny_vasey: i agree with you, Final Crisis can be a ridiculously confusing read, especially if you haven't read everything that's been tied in and associated with it. There's an episode of Justice League where Toy Man thinks that he has disintegrated Superman where he in fact sent him way into the future; that's what the whole Darkseid/Infinite Crisis Bat death reminds me of. DC would never really kill off their biggest selling character, but considering that the New 52 didn't come too long after they very well could have

Reading R.I.P (Last Rites) makes the Batman part of FC a little easier to understand and Batman and Robin Vol.3 by Morrison makes Return of Bruce Wayne a little easier to understand all of the events going on... but then to fully grasp R.I.P you have to read Batman and Son and Batman The Black Glove... That's kind of a problem in Morrison's run, the only good place to jump on is at the very beginning.

Ok, the rocket was something that the survivors of the crisis sent into the time stream, it just kind of followed Bruce into the past, he didn't travel in it. Darkseid froze Bruce first, then activated something called an Ancestor Box, which released some kind of monster that followed Bruce through time until he got to the present. That was explained in a two issue arc Morrison did in Batman after the 700th issue. Darkseid made the batman clones because he thought batman was the perfect human. The only problem was the clones couldn't handle batman's memories and killed themselves. One of the clones was left behind by Darkseid for his bigger plan to throw off the Justice League, make them believe that batman really had died. My advice would be to read Batman and Robin (pre-New 52), that volume holds most of the answers.

@knightofthechronicle: You mean the batman and robin reborn novel by grant Morrison?

@jayc1324: Yeah, and the rest of the volumes of his run on it.

@danny_vasey: But you do have to consider, how much of this is still canon in the New 52 universe? Sure the timeline mentions that Batman had "disappeared" and that Dick took over as Batman. But consider Knightfall. It shows that Batman "just encounters" Bane. There's nothing about Azrael, or Bruce breaking his back. So who says the events of Final Crisis are still relevant? He could've time traveled to the past, and his coming back causes a paradox in the time stream, thus allowing the Crime Syndicate's entry into our world. Who knows. I wrote a thread before about this new timeline and if it's canon, and many people agree, new 52 Batman is much too rushed, as his robins only last a year or two at best, Jason Todd dies the same year he becomes robin. Dick is 16 when he becomes robin and 18 when he becomes Nightwing. What I'm saying is, the events of Final Crisis, Batman RIP, Bruce Wayne: The Road Home, Batman Battle for the Cowl may have never happened the way we read them, or not at all.

You should check out the Time and the Batman graphic novel. It's got a short story that fills in the gaps between RIP and Final Crisis.